The Silk Stocking Murders (29 page)

It was three o’clock, rather more than two and a half hours after Pleydell had been removed, raving and struggling, from the Albany, and a quartette was sitting in Roger’s study composed of the triumphant novelist himself, the Assistant Commissioner and the two officers in charge of the case. In the next room Anne was still lying down after her ordeal, with Moira holding one of her hands and Jerry Newsome the other; completely happy in the vindication of the desperate plan in which she had played so gallant a part. Her lapse into unconsciousness had been but momentary (although it seemed hours at the time, her period of suspension had actually been only forty seconds, according to Roger’s wristwatch) and her recovery considerably more rapid, and less unpleasant, than on the previous day, when she had had a severe blow on the head to contend with as well.

The terrible shock of realising himself unmasked before all those witnesses had toppled Pleydell’s brain, merely balanced on the verge as it had been, finally over into the abyss of complete insanity. In his own financial line he had been a genius, and genius being already abnormal the curtain between it and the more ultimate abnormality of madness is always thin; in Pleydell’s case it had always been not merely thin, but ragged; a severe shock at any time and of any sort, such as financial disaster, might have sufficed to tear it down altogether; and now that the shock had come, down it had gone. A general, sigh of relief had gone up when the fact became realised. It was far the best thing that could have happened, for had Pleydell remained sane, repudiated his confession and pleaded not guilty, it was still a little doubtful whether he could have been convicted on such actual evidence as there was against him.

The Assistant Commissioner, in his relief generous without stint of praise and congratulations, had stayed, to lunch in the Albany, and now the two officers; their prisoner safely disposed of and the formalities duly performed, had come back to listen to their amateur colleague’s story. To them, no less than to the Assistant Commissioner himself, the identification of Pleydell with the maniac they had been hunting had come as a complete and paralysing surprise.

“And we can’t say that you were watching them all and hit on him as the most likely, Mr. Sheringham,” Moresby admitted, “because you’d written his name in that envelope you gave the Commissioner beforehand.”

“That’s why I gave it him,” Roger grinned. “I knew you’d say something like that if I didn’t.”

“And Mr. Sheringham dropped a note on my knee at the beginning, telling me to keep my eye on Pleydell, too,” Sir Paul added.

“I was afraid he might get violent,” Roger explained. “That’s why I put you in a place of vantage behind him.”

“When did you first begin to suspect him, Mr. Sheringham?” asked Superintendent Green. The Superintendent had thawed considerably since twelve o’clock, but it was evident that he still considered an amateur had no right at all to succeed where the Yard had failed.

“Yesterday afternoon,” Roger replied. “After the attack on Miss Manners, that’s all. I won’t say he hadn’t crossed my mind before that, but never really seriously. And when I did come to consider him seriously, of course, I soon became positive. The more I thought about it, in fact, the more obvious it became. And I knew the real criminal, whoever he was, must have a key to Newsome’s front door, a false beard and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, to say nothing of that pestle-shaped weapon of hard rubber; so that’s how I was able to include the list of those things as waiting for you in Pleydell’s rooms, in the envelope I gave Sir Paul beforehand.”

“Yes, and there we found them right enough,” admitted Moresby readily, “though, as you said, they weren’t much in the way of real proof. But how did you get over his alibis, Mr. Sheringham? I don’t understand that even now. How did he kill that girl in Pelham Mansions at the same time as he was eating lunch with you at your club?”

Roger took a pull at the tankard by his side. Out in the world a grandmotherly government was forbidding its citizens to quench their noble thirsts with good XXXX; in the Albany, with the help of a nice, round-bellied cask, such feeble puerilities could be disregarded.

“Fill up, you two,” said Roger. “There’s a gallon or two left, and I hate stale beer. I’m going to begin at the beginning, so fortify yourselves.”

With happy grins the two representatives of the same grandmotherly government took the necessary step towards fortifying themselves.

“Monte Carlo is the beginning,” said Roger, “so I’ll begin there. Well, the truth is that there never was a murder at Monte Carlo at all. The French police were right; that was a perfectly genuine suicide. So there goes alibi No. 1. But that was what gave Pleydell his idea. He arrived just afterwards, you remember, and must have heard plenty of talk about it. The thing tickled his imagination. He may have been overworking or his health may have been bad; anyhow, he had probably got into a queer state. You can picture him brooding over that girl hanging on the door by one of her own stockings. He loved it. Nothing would satisfy him but that he must see such a thing happen. So the first thing he does when he gets back to England is to do it.

“You must remember that Pleydell suffered badly from megalomania. I’d noticed that on several occasions.‘If I say a thing is, then it is; if I say the impossible shall be done, then it shall.’ But he was so quiet about it, while the usual megalomaniac is so bombastic, that one simply didn’t recognise it for what it was. Anyhow, that gave him the idea that all was possible to him; that if it amused him to see girls die in this way then it was only right that girls should die for his pleasure; and that of course
he
could never be even suspected, much less found out.

“I was with him once in the street when we met Miss Carruthers and was rather surprised to find that he knew her. It turned out, however, that he was financially behind the show she’s in. It never occurred to me at the time, but of course there was his connection with Unity Ransome. Perhaps he didn’t even go to Sutherland Avenue with the idea of killing her. He may have seen his opportunity and just taken it. Probably that is what happened.

“As for the note left in that case, and the next, I can’t tell you exactly how he induced the girls to write them; but you can picture well enough the sort of thing that must have happened. Perhaps he offered them a new fountain-pen and wanted to see how it suited their writing; perhaps he was pretending to tell their characters from their handwriting, anything like that. All we can say definitely is that he dictated and induced them, somehow or other, to take down his words verbatim. But it evidently wasn’t easy, because in the last case, where he had no time to waste, he contented himself with cutting out a verse from a handy volume of poetry.

“Well, the death of Janet Manners whetted his appetite.

He stood off for six weeks, then he went for that poor little prostitute, Elsie Benham. That, of course, was his safest line. There’s no connection to be traced in those cases at all. But I don’t expect he was worrying about being traced. He would be immune from that sort of thing. And so next we have him actually killing his own fiancée.”

“Now that I do
not
see how anyone could be expected to tumble to, Mr. Sheringham,” said Moresby, without much grammar, but with considerable feeling.

“Why not?” Roger retorted. “Neither of us did, as it happens, but that was because we both fell into the same error. We assumed that the engagement was a happy one. As a matter of fact it wasn’t anything of the kind. That never came out at the inquest, of course, but it was common gossip among their own small circle of intimates. That complete idiot Newsome only thought to mention it to me at one a.m. this morning, after I’d been questioning him about the two of them for a couple of hours on end. But you made a worse mistake than I did, because when you heard that Newsome and Lady Ursula had been very thick at one time, you thought that her subsequent engagement to Pleydell gave Newsome a motive for killing her. Knowing Newsome, I never thought that. What it actually did was to give Pleydell the motive.”

The Assistant Commissioner, who had heard all this before, nodded sagely.

“From what I can gather,” Roger went on, “Lady Ursula was always in love with Newsome, and engaged herself to Pleydell in sheer desperation when she became convinced that Newsome wasn’t in love with her. He had no idea of this, of course, and hasn’t now; but it’s quite plain to me. Well, that didn’t make for a happy engagement, did it? As I see it, they were continually quarrelling, and Lady Ursula was always on the verge of breaking it off, till they fell in with each other that night (Pleydell never had a real alibi for that night, you remember) and had one final grand bust-up when Lady Ursula, very nervy and suffering from a bad headache, finally gave him his congé. Probably they went into that studio to have their quarrel in private, and Pleydell, his megalomania utterly outraged, simply took what he considered the proper steps to restore it to self-respect. There was a struggle in that case, because he hadn’t got his weapon with him, and he had to tie her wrists and ankles, and no doubt he gagged her in the way I first suggested, Moresby, when we reconstructed the case, if you remember.”

Moresby nodded. “Yes, I remember. With a scarf or something like that, you said. But what about the note, Mr. Sheringham?”

“Ah, yes, that note,” Roger smiled. “I felt in my bones all the time that the note was taking you on the wrong track, Moresby, but you wouldn’t listen. You see, one thing struck me forcibly about that note, but I didn’t mention it to you because I knew you wouldn’t pay any attention. It was the way it was folded. You pointed out that the main fold didn’t come in the middle, and so something must have been cut off the top; but you quite missed the point later on that, if it was the man for whom it had been left who made use of it afterwards, the fold
would
have been in the centre, because he would have cut the top off
before
he folded it, not after. That told me (as soon as I heard from the valet that the note had not been left in an envelope) that it was not the man for whom it had been left who used it, but someone else who had got possession of it, folded it and carried it off before cutting it. You see?”

“Oh, Mr. Sheringham, come!” expostulated Moresby. “That’s too subtle altogether.”

“That’s exactly what I knew you’d say,” Roger replied equably. “So I didn’t say it. But I deduced from that subtle bit of reasoning that somebody might be in illegal possession of one of Newsome’s keys; and lo! when I questioned his valet, I found that one of his keys actually was missing. Newsome had had his pocket picked some weeks ago, and his keys and wallet stolen. It was Pleydell, of course, looking for letters from Lady Ursula; and no doubt he thought the keys would come in uncommonly handy too.

“The truth is patent enough, if one reads between the lines. Pleydell knew all about Newsome and Lady Ursula, and he was mad-jealous of Newsome. He was always trying to get some evidence that the two were on more intimate terms than those of happy-go-lucky friendship; hence the pocket-picking. I’ve no doubt he was in the habit of shadowing Lady Ursula; at any rate he must have seen her go into Newsome’s flat the day before the murder. That may have clinched his suspicions; we can’t tell. Anyhow, as soon as the valet was out of the way, he went in too, with that handy key, and found the note. He took it, seeing at once the use to which he could put it if occasion arose. Oh, Moresby, why didn’t you take a hint from me and try what would happen if one assumed that Newsome was speaking the truth and it was the facts, not he, that were at fault?

“Well, I don’t know whether Pleydell realised at the time, though he certainly did later, that he had, wittingly or unwittingly, built up a very pretty case against Newsome. The next thing to do was to develop it. And so we came to the last murder.

“So far we’ve had murders with two different motives. Out of the series of four only the first two were pure lust-murders. Lady Ursula’s was a vengeance-murder, or a megalomania-murder if you like. The last was a murder committed with the sole motive of increasing the strength of the case against the man he loathed. By being preferred to himself in Lady Ursula’s affections, you see, Newsome had committed the unforgivable sin. He must be eliminated at all costs, and very cunningly the trap was laid.” Here Roger paused to prevent a little more beer from going stale.

“Pleydell
was
a cunning man, you see. Oh, very cunning. Do you know what brought him to Scotland Yard, Moresby? Not any vague suspicions, as we thought at the time, but that paragraph in
The Evening Clarion
which you showed me, saying that the police were taking an interest in Lady Ursula’s death and hinting at exciting developments. Pleydell knew well enough that the police don’t take an interest in death unless something like murder is suspected. He did a bit of hard thinking, put himself in our minds, and proceeded to act precisely as we should expect him to; and very well he played his part too. But he wanted more than that. He wanted to keep abreast of our investigations and know every minute just what we thought, were doing, and were going to do. And there I admit frankly that I was the mug. I offered him what he wanted with both hands.

“Well, Pleydell didn’t mind the police investigation. Not he. He welcomed it. And it amused him terribly. There was no question that he himself could ever be suspected, you see, and now he could go right ahead with his case against Newsome. And he went. Having worked out his plot, he proceeded to put it into operation. He went in disguise to a girl in one of his shows (did you know he was behind
Her Husband’s Wife
too? I found that out from Miss Deeping on the telephone last night), so that he wouldn’t be recognised if seen outside, rang her bell, whipped off the disguise and went in. No doubt he’d telephoned to her in advance or knew in some other way that the coast was perfectly clear till well after lunch. Well, he’d worked out a very clever alibi, and had no time to waste. The first thing he does is to tell the girl that a friend of his called Gerald Newsome is extremely interested in her (all this is only guesswork, of course, but it must be near enough to the facts) and has consulted him about putting up the money for a show in which she would be the star. (Of course he’d have chosen a girl who did know Jerry.) Newsome has said something about taking her out to lunch that day to discuss the proposition; has she heard from him?